A bizarre racist outburst at a Texas school board isn’t an isolated event — it’s part of a national pattern
I’ll make this one easy for you. The Guardian is a garbage white supremacist liberal rag that does the bidding of North Atlantic imperialists. But here’s a shit article they wrote that explains this particular thing: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea
Here’s the subtitle: “Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world”
That’s right. There was no such thing as the white race until the 1600s. And here’s the relevant excerpt:
[…] the plantation owners initially sought to protect themselves by giving their “Christian” servants legal privileges not available to their enslaved “Negroes”. The idea was to buy off the allegiance of indentured Europeans with a set of entitlements that, however meagre, set them above enslaved Africans. Toward the end of the 17th century, this scheme witnessed a significant shift: many of the laws that regulated slave and servant behaviour – the 1681 Servant Act in Jamaica, for example, which was later copied for use in South Carolina – began to describe the privileged class as “whites” and not as “Christians”.
Whiteness, white supremacy, was invented in the new settler state that became the USA. It was an extension of European supremacy and part of the liberalization process that was occurring throughout Europe as the “age of discovery” began lifting the merchant class into positions of power. This new financial class sought new social forms that would allow them to supplant kings while still maintaining the power structures they needed to continue extending their dominance across the world. Since kings were kings by divine right, they were literally working against a social fiction that required them to attack religion, which was impossible, so they needed new systems that directed power away from religious explanations. They needed to maintain Christianity as a power structure but divorce it from kings. Thus, from the 17th century onward, an entirely new system of racialization was devised and expanded including things like race science, anthropology, cherrypicking from religious and philosophical traditions, eventually incorporating Drawinian theory, and focused entirely on making the imperial project manageable.
In the US you see this pretty damningly with regards to the native population. They were a different race, they were not Christians, they needed to be mass murdered, their lands needed to be blighted and destroyed, their ways of life (plants, animals, and water) needed to be made extinct and poisoned beyond repair. To do this, the US needed to field a military into the frontier. That’s the source of every town named “Fort Something”. Those forts were created to exterminate and oppress native Americans. Those towns never stopped being that. It’s just that they were victorious in their extermination campaigns. The laws are still on the books. The police force is still descended from the institutions of genocide. The roads, ports, prisons, residential neighborhoods, waterways, industrial zones, and agricultural zones around those towns are the living embodiment of the displacement efforts that trace themselves back to the frontier forts and their genocidal program, founded on racism.
And even The Guardian, shite rag that it is, is able to write about it.
Racism also wasn’t invented solely by “white” people. That kind of myopic thinking is a big factor in why we can’t get over that shit.
Tribalism has been a way of life since life began on this rock.
You’re right that they’re not exactly the same, but they are intrinsically linked. Racism is an advanced form where, instead of just and us-vs-them mentality is used to protect against invaders, it is weaponized as tool to use lower echelons on the class hierarchy against themselves to empower the upper class and keep the masses from realizing how shit they have it.
Tribalism is the root instinct that drives it, its just been modified for use in class warfare.
They are linked, but they’re talking about how modern race ideas are evidenced in racism. It used to be that Irish people weren’t considered white even though they largely have pale skin. Today that’s a very weird idea because of course Irish people are white. But that wasn’t the case when the US was getting a mass of immigrants. Yes, people were bigots hundreds of years ago. Yes, racism and tribalism are linked, but the sheer concept of being white, black, red, yellow, etc didn’t exist until relatively recently.
This is a lie white people use to justify their systems and make themselves feel better.
Racism, as we understand it, is a historical system that was, in fact, invented soley by white male Europeans and their descendants for the purposes of managing their empire.
Tribalism isn’t racism. Racism uses tribalist tendencies to achieve its aims. Racism is a very specific historical phenomenon.
Why is looking at the root cause of something a “justification” in your mind? If all we do is react to what’s happening now instead of finding out how to prevent it from happening in the future, we’re just fighting a losing war of attrition for the sake of ideology. In order to solve this problem we need to look at more than just the surface, and do more than just point fingers at everyone else.
